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Freedom is not choosing that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch
Age: 79 †
Born: 1919
Born: July 15
Died: 1999
Died: February 8
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Writer
Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
Quite
Knowing
Understanding
Freedom
Respecting
Moving
Choosing
Lost
Merely
Make
Move
Things
Already

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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A death is the most terrible of facts.
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
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... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
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A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
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All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
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Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
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I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
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for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
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Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
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Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
Iris Murdoch